{"id":15949,"date":"2014-05-17T07:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=15949"},"modified":"2014-05-17T07:42:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-17T11:42:48","slug":"is-the-penny-still-useful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/05\/17\/is-the-penny-still-useful\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the penny still useful?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadians all know, and In Box readers may recall<\/a>, that the penny was killed in this country over a year ago.<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>

My two cents worth: these were the only pennies I could find in our house to illustrate this post. Photo: Lucy Martin<\/p><\/div>\n

Oh, one can still spend a penny, or turn them in for larger denominations. Donating any cached pennies to charity is a popular option. But when making purchases in stores across Canada, prices are now rounded up or down to the nearest nickel.<\/p>\n

What’s that been like? Writing a one-year retrospective for Postmedia News, Willian Wolfe-Wylie reports<\/a><\/p>\n

One Quebecer decided to track it and actually find out. Roger Guitar has written\u00a0letters to the editor<\/a>\u00a0to several newspapers to let them know that he tracked every one of his cash purchases for 1 year, from April to May, and found out that he came out ahead of the game: By 89-cents!<\/p>\n

Well done, Roger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article includes a chart<\/a> of different price points for rounding pennies by province.<\/p>\n

Speaking personally, I got used to the change almost instantly. I recently spent several weeks back in my home state where getting pennies back as change came as an annoyance. It felt like the only (and I mean the only) reason to bother with pennies at all would be to avoid getting more of the little pests back in other transactions.<\/p>\n

This ABC news item<\/a> (which lists no year) says “Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., has introduced a bill to get rid of the penny.” Further fact-checking suggests that bill dates to 2001, that Kolbe left that office in 2006<\/a> and the matter is not under current consideration<\/a>. Most of the discussion I found on the topic (on dropping the penny in the U.S.) is at least a year old. So this doesn’t seem like a hot topic at present. But it’s a persistent one.<\/p>\n

There is a U.S. group set up for that sole cause: Retire the Penny<\/a>. Meanwhile, this commentary in Forbes<\/a> speaks in favor of keeping the humble copper-ish coin.<\/p>\n

How about it, my fellow Americans? Is the penny worth the bother? Or does it deserve continued use?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadians all know, and In Box readers may recall, that the penny was killed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[880,14486,5623,14487,4868],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15949"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16026,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15949\/revisions\/16026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}